You can always create posts in appropriate communities to start conversations on topics you’re interested in. Be the change you wish to see in the world.

I don’t care much for most pop culture stuff and get enough by happenstance from other sources/people.

Bitcoin price movement seems to follow the US stock market, so I wouldn’t bet on it.

IIRC, a deposit is made by two parties to create a lightning network channel that’s enough to cover all transactions (kinda like a multi-sig escrow), and both parties have to sign-off on their balances after every transaction (the last balance signed by both parties is the only valid state). I think most people would use a custodial wallet where the custodian already has channels set up, and this would require trust in the custodian. Lightning networks didn’t exist, and wasn’t fully spec’d out the last time I looked into it though.

I don’t really like rogues (because you pretty much have to redo everything again), but I do usually play games with the difficulty settings all the way up (not on “ironman” though). Being able to retry from a recent save isn’t too frustrating, and you can finish many games without even learning or using various mechanics if you don’t use the highest difficulty.

Could use it kind of like an extra monitor with something like Barrier.

Could use it like a home assistant for a kitchen or something, but I don’t know if there’s any good privacy respecting software for that ATM (looks like MyCroft went bankrupt).

I used an old laptop I had laying around for controlling a Maslow CNC. Could also use a laptop to run OctoPrint or something.

In the early days, the Bitcoin community was very ideological (and I guess a lot of it still is). Libertarian, Mises Institute, Ayn Rand, abolish the Fed types. People actively willed-it into having value (e.g. setting up a pizza delivery for 10,000 BTC). It’s specifically designed to be “digital gold,” where the amount that can be mined decays logarithmically over time, so supply is effectively constrained (very much so now), and the more people that want to buy it, the more it’s worth, because that means you need to find people willing to sell it at a particular price. If you were to think of it as a currency, it would be a disinflationary currency, or effectively deflationary (because coins get “lost”). This gave and gives people that hold Bitcoin financial incentive to proselytize Bitcoin so their holdings are worth more. Overall, it’s a pretty stupid idea, IMO, and the crypto space is full of mostly scammers and grifters now. A deflationary currency is a really bad idea under capitalism, since it encourages people to just hoard the currency instead of loaning it out, investing in new businesses, etc. Gold is also a horrible currency, which is why no country uses it as such, or even backs its own currency with gold anymore.

Some of the “open” models seem to have augmented their training data with OpenAI and Anthropic requests (I. E. they sometimes say they’re ChatGPT or Claude). I guess that may be considered piracy. There are a lot of customer service bots that just hook into OpenAI APIs and don’t have a lot of guardrails, so you can do stuff like ask a car dealership’s customer service to write you Python code. Actual piracy would require someone leaking the model.

Easy enough to scroll past. Hexbear was a bit annoying with what looked like brigading sometimes. Don’t recall anything too egregious from lemmygrad and don’t recall beehaw being tankie. Awful.systems is very toxic, but I’d rather just choose not to participate myself than my home instance making that decision for me. On that note, lemmy needs tools so users can block users/communities/instances; I think some proprietary apps support it, but I’m not going to use proprietary software if I don’t have to.

What tankie instances has sh.itjust.works de-federated from? And any discussions as to why? I moved here from lemmy.world, specifically because they were too ban/block/defed happy.

That’s really cool (not the auto opt-in thing). If I understand correctly, that system looks like it offers pretty strong theoretical privacy guarantees (assuming their closed-source client software works as they say, with sending fake queries and all that for differential privacy). If the backend doesn’t work like they say, they could infer what landmark is in an image when finding the approximate minimum distance to embeddings in their DB, but with the fake queries they can’t be sure which one is real. They can’t see the actual image either way as long as the “128-bit post-quantum” encryption algorithm doesn’t have any vulnerabilies (and the closed source software works as described).

I think it’s common where meat is sold in open-air markets. I read an article about the practice last year.

I think it’s real. Though, it is kinda suspicious they were able to respond so fast to a McDonald’s tip; could’ve been parallel construction.

Tor for browsing is similar to a VPN. I2p and Tribbler for downloads is also similar. You could also just rent a cheap VPS and set up your own VPN. There’s a high chance people will be doing illegal shit through a VPN-like services, so I don’t think a p2p VPN-like service where everyone is like an exit node is viable.

Bellingcat

My friend just hooks his laptop up to his TV, connects to his VPN, and plays popcorntime (streaming torrents). He used to use streaming sites, but those have been getting taken down left and right.

Do you remember when it was commonly advised to use fake names and birthdays on online forms, and when “spyware” was a term?

Happens when you’re not proud of what you’re contributing to. Probably most workers, tbh.

I don’t think federation has to be an obstacle for non-tech people. They don’t really have to know about it, and it can be something they learn about later. I really don’t know if federation stops people from trying it out. Don’t people think, “I don’t know what instance to join, so I’m not going to choose any?”

Personally, having no algorithm for your home feed is what I don’t like about it. Everything is chronological. Some people I follow post many times a day, some post once per month, some post stuff I’m extremely interested in sporadically, followed by a sea of random posts. Hashtag search and follow is also less useful because there’s no option for an algo.

The UI seems fine to me. I guess I’m not picky about UIs. The one nitpick I have is on mobile, tapping an image will just full-screen the image instead of opening the thread.